Small Treasures

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I went to walk the dog at lunchtime and realised that sheep were grazing along the ridgeway where I had intended to take him. So I kept him on the lead and meandered along the lanes instead, past a clear, shallow stream and around a pond where we startled a pair of  ducks, hidden under the branches of willow.

Behind the hills, the sky was bruised blue, but the steep grassy slopes glowed in the winter sun. I paused and thought how lucky I am, to be here, in such a beautiful place.

Earlier in the week, a friend reminded me that happiness springs from gratitude, rather than the other way round – advice I intend to take with me into this new decade. I want to remember to use gratitude as an active principle, seeking out the good and then treasuring it.

In a year baptised in fire and flood, warmongering and violence, whatever else 2020 brings, I hope it brings you many small wonders to light the way through the dark.

Healing Words

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Last week, I headed out on a blustery, rainy night to listen to poetry being shared in a warehouse. This spoken word event grew out of an initiative set up by Take Art, an organisation that promotes the arts here in the county of Somerset. Their philosophy is that we need to ‘keep believing in the power of the Arts to transform individuals and communities for the better’ – and that November evening was as good an example as any. The Rainbow Fish Speak Easy began life as a project designed to help adults with mental health challenges find new ways to talk about their lives, and now the events welcome everyone.

Besides readings by three professional poets, there were open mic slots in which members of the audience were invited to share their work. While the rain drummed down on the metal roof, ordinary men and women, young and old, overcame their nerves and got up to read their pieces. The themes were as varied as the people there – from searching for ancestors, learning to drive, dealing with depression and the joy of owning a key to your own front door. It was moving, entertaining, funny and thought-provoking, with lots of applause and loud cheers.

It struck me again how poetry not only creates opportunities to share and be heard, but builds windows that allow us to see beyond our own lives and understand the world as others experience it. Which is, of course, what the arts are all about, and just one reason why they are so important.

In an age of austerity and stretched resources, the funding for projects like this one is under threat as rarely before – although it is precisely in these difficult times that we need the arts and all that they offer. I wonder if one day, the Government will be puzzled why there are no world-class British artists, musicians or poets – unless perhaps Eton educated. But the arts should never be just a pursuit of the wealthy: as the events like the Rainbow Fish Speak Easy show, they are a vital expression of the lives and souls of us all.

 

Flakes of Gold

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Last night’s half moon was a haze and today the woods seem singed, as though burnt by an exhausted, sinking sun, with faded greens and exposed boughs. Summer is passing – it’s back to work. Yet these past few months have felt like so much hard work, with juggling jobs and balancing the books. These are not comfortable times.

It sometimes seems like the easy option would be to say, Enough! Despite knowing this isn’t an option. Not really.

Instead, I’ve fallen back on looking for flakes of gold; finding the little glimmer that can light a whole day. For me, this has often meant searching for a familiar wonder: glimpses of glow worms burning like alien lights in the hedgerows. I’ve written about these beautiful bugs before, tiny neon lanterns, but this year they’ve taken on even more importance for me.

Last thing each evening after dark, I walk up the lane in the hopes of spotting a tiny green dot of light, almost talismanic. With each passing night, their numbers dwindle, like the lights going out along the front of a seaside town at the end of the season. Still I smile to see them so late on, now into September, my birthday month – a time of personal new beginnings.

I remember, many years ago, panning for gold in a water way – and the wonder at discovering tiny glints of yellow in the mud.

It comes down to feeding the heart with these scatterings. These splinters of beauty. Flakes of gold.

Wild Garlic

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There can be few places more beautiful than England in the month of May. Late afternoon, I went for a walk along a meander of the River Stour, which winds its way between the market town of Sturminster Newton and the village of Hinton St Mary. The water was slick with willow pollen and a little way up from the old brick mill, a couple of boys and a girl were splashing about in the ford, laughing and screaming at the cold.

The path took me past the house that was once home to the writer Thomas Hardy and his new wife, Emma. Some years ago, I used to receive acupuncture there. The sessions took place in a downstairs room that had been repurposed as a clinic, with a black treatment couch and charts of meridians and pressure points on the walls. At the time, I found it odd to think that some 130 years earlier, Hardy might have been sat at his desk in that same room, drafting The Return of the Native. What would his ghost make of the procession of semi-dressed strangers who visited now, to be pricked and prodded with tiny needles?

Further along the path from the house, through a spinney that floods in heavy rain, stand the ruined arches of the railway bridge, dismantled as part of the Beeching cuts. Here, a sports bag, clothing and a pair of shoes hung from tree. In the river below, two heads bobbed, shiny pink against dull green, like a couple of bizarre lily buds; two men wild swimming and scaring the ducks.

Beyond the bridge and the surrounding trees lie water meadows, now dotted with sheep and chubby lambs.

After the emptiness of winter, the fields have been repopulated, which means my young dog often has to stay on the lead longer than he might like, but there’s still plenty for him to sniff and enjoy. The path crosses the meadows into the tail end of Twinwood Copse, and here I paused.

The air was rich and heady, and in the shade of the trees lay a sea of stars, a pocket handkerchief; the fading white flowers of wild garlic lit by the sun. I let the dog lap from the stream while I drank it up; a sight to fold up and store in the memory; to bring forth when the warmth has gone.

Spring Slow

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‘April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of dead land’

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

 

The arrival of spring brings with it a certain exhaustion.

Days of sun followed by frost and snowfall; an hour vanishes as the clocks change. Gardens, fields and hedgerows are flecked with brilliant greens, yellows and purples; yet there’s a lingering weariness in the bones, tired from winter, not quite rested, newly unsettled by the changing season.

The contrast between all this fresh growth and life steadily progressing, one day at a time, can feel almost overwhelming.

I found myself sat in a kitchen chair, gazing at nothing, when there was a rumble of thunder and the sky broke open. Hail bounced off the road and rooftops. The kitchen skylight was pelted with pellets of ice, covering it in a layer of white. Then, as quickly as it had come, the storm passed over and the hail began to melt in the returning sunshine. Within a minute or two, only a scattering of glittering crystals remained. I watched them disappear.

When I went outside, I knew what I might find – the remnants of a rainbow, where the sun struck the dark clouds as they rolled eastwards. With all this spring busyness, an invitation to pause, look up, slow down.

The Air Sweet with Violets

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This morning, I was walking along a wooded ridge when I spotted my first violets of the year, pale in the thin sun. As with the first sight of snowdrops, the discovery made me smile; spring flowers feel like a kept promise.

When I got home, I looked up the violet in The Language of Flowers; or, Flora Symbolica, by John Ingram, which lists the traditional meanings associated with plants.  I came across my copy, published in 1887, in a second-hand bookshop, and discovered that an earlier owner had pressed scores of dried flowers and leaves within its pages like fragile, antique bookmarks.

While there isn’t a pressed flower to mark it, the entry for the violet is much longer than for many of the others – somewhat ironic given that the violet is often associated with modesty, as well as faithfulness. Poets from Homer to Keats have celebrated it, and myths have been woven around it. According to The Language of Flowers, the Greek goddess Artemis transformed Ia, daughter of Midas, into a violet to conceal her from the amorous intentions of Apollo; while Jupiter caused the first sweet violets to appear as sustenance for poor, hapless Io, when she fled in the form of a white heifer from the wrath of Juno. So in this way the violet is linked to concealment, of beauty creeping beneath notice.

Yet with the arrival of spring, violets sometimes cluster in abundance on hedge banks and around the roots of trees in woodland; where one might be invisible, together they attract attention. They bloom all around the garden here – in paving cracks and flower pots, roots taking hold tenaciously; then, when the flowers are faded, their brittle pods scatter seeds far and wide. Small yet rich in colour and fragrance, they appear where it suits them; an unasked for gift.

 

Violet images (c) Sue Belfrage

On Vulnerability

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Everything is stripped away. In the garden, robins and blackbirds perch on bare branches, while wrens hop in leaf litter among scrawny tangles of shrub. In the fields, the low sun picks out the horizon. There is a starkness to the land.

I find myself facing this new year cautiously. Little feels certain or secure, worries abound, things over which I can exercise little control. But with this vulnerability there has come a subtle shifting, of gratitude and appreciation, of letting go and acceptance, learning to look outwards rather than in.

Now the solstice has passed, the days are growing longer; light is returning. Primula are already brightening up the bank side by the wall. They might yet be covered by snow, but the seasons will carry on turning.

Growing from What’s Buried

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The autumn rain has awoken a lingering ghost in the garden. A tuft of honey fungus has sprouted where an apple tree once stood ten years ago. The common name given to three closely related species – A. mellea, A. bulbosa and A. ostoyae, honey fungus is feared by gardeners for its ability to kill a wide range of trees and shrubs. Yet, while it doesn’t taste of honey, the young caps with their white gills are edible when well cooked.

At this time of year, fungi spring up as if by magic, here one moment and collapsed in puddles of decay the next. While walking in the woods today, I came across peeling caps of fly agaric, the poisonous, red-and-white toadstool of fairy tales. Their appearance was another reminder of what lies hidden, ready to surface when conditions are right.

Neither animal nor plant, mushrooms and toadstools are the fruiting parts of mycelium, the fibrous white bodies of fungi buried in moist soil and rotting wood. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has discovered how trees use underground networks of fungi to communicate with each other and send each other nutrients, likening the systems to our own neural and social networks.

The reappearance of fungi at this time of year also fits with the traditional celebrations of Samhain or Halloween, when the veil between worlds of the dead and the living is believed to become less opaque, and the past returns to haunt us. In my own dreams in recent weeks, buried memories have been resurfacing and I have found myself waking in anger at perceived wrongs.

So, what to do about returning ghosts? Folklore advises us to treat them respectfully – and then, perhaps, they might just help us, rather than harm us. Now is the season to honour the past.

Boundaries

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I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: somebody was standing on our garden wall and lopping off the branches from our hazel tree that overhung the wall slightly. And the tree-lopper hadn’t even bothered to knock on our door to talk to me about it first! I hesitated for a second or two – I rarely lose my temper – and then hurtled outside to ask them what they thought they were doing. A few heated words were exchanged and I spent the rest of the day smouldering with rage, until an apology and a bottle of wine helped set matters right.

Even at the time, I was taken aback by the strength of my anger and how it flared up seemingly out of nowhere. The overwhelming sense of affront and indignation – of how very dare they! And now, when I see our 11-week-old terrier puppy starting to yap at the passing strangers he glimpses through the gate, I’m struck again by how deeply rooted this territorial instinct of ours goes.

The theory proposed by neuroscientist Paul D MacLean in the 1960s argues that primitive drives such as this are processed by the reptilian brain, which comprises the basal ganglia and brain stem, and which also governs vital functions such as breathing and blood pressure as well as procedural memory. According to this model, like the fight-or-flight impulse, the territorial instinct is hardwired into us as human beings.

Which is quite a sobering thought.

At least, I guess, I didn’t rush outside and try to bite the offending tree-hacker (though if I’d had the teeth for it, I might have been tempted). If the territorial instinct comes as naturally to us as breathing, then perhaps it’s a question of how to adapt these kinds of instincts to the times we live in – and trying to make conscious decisions about when to suppress and, likewise, when to give in to our animal drives?

The new pup: butter wouldn’t melt…

Into the Gloaming

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Nightfall turned me into a ghost. It had been so hot, I’d dressed in white and hadn’t thought to change into more suitable clothing for a late evening walk. Now my husband was a little unnerved as I appeared to be floating across the field towards him.

With the twilight came the dusk chorus, dark’s answer to the dawn; in the woods, owls hooted and screeched. There was rustling close by, perhaps deer or a badger stirring, as the night woke up.

I’d hoped the day’s heat would be enough to light up the hedgerows, and I wasn’t disappointed. As we started down the track, we spotted the first tiny flicker: a glow worm suspended from a blade of grass. Further along, we found another and another deep within the hedge, fragile greenish-white dots of light.

It’s no wonder folktales abound about faeries. Midsummer Eve, a painting by the English artist Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), captures and transforms the charm of these dabs of hedgerow brightness, which cast their own faint shadows.

Of course, in traditional tales, fairy folk or, as they are also known, the Sidhe (‘The Good People’), are much more ambiguous beings than the merry crowd depicted in Hughes’s picture, and best not crossed…

Although neither fairy folk nor indeed worms, glow worms are similarly best left undisturbed in their natural habitats. Their bioluminescence is mainly generated by the female beetle (Lampyris noctiluca) with the aim of attracting a mate. In England, the best time to see them is between June and August – and  those up the lane certainly seem to be more active on balmy nights.

All the same, while they might be firmly of this world, glow worms nevertheless seem to suggest that, on warm summer nights at least, a little magic might just be possible…